bouyance

Cleaned the apartment Sunday night.  Spent yesterday bitching, moaning, napping, and downloading cute games for the iPAQ, which pretty much is a useless device—I carry it around hoping I might need it for something, and I worry about losing it.  But back to Sunday night… 

Stayed up until 6:00 AM Monday morning cleaning.  Used every rag, sock, and towel in the place.  I now have a 300 pound pile of laundry on my bathroom floor that smells like Murphy’s Oil Soap.  I had to get the place at least tenable looking because the landlord’s cute blonde grandson was coming with a locksmith at 9:00 AM to re-key all the locks in my building.  His note said it would take about an hour. 

They came and woke me at 9:30 AM and stayed for four hours.  I started out tired, cranky and irritable.  My usual, I know.  But then I got worse.  The fat, ugly locksmith comes in with globs of slush, takes the locks apart, leaves the pieces on the floor and goes away for twenty minutes.  He did this six times.  The pretty young blonde hovered about being useless, but polite, during each visitation.  This made me anxious in addition to annoyed; attractive young men make me anxious, especially if I am not having (or not able to have) sex with them.  By 11:00 AM, when I had expected to be back in bed snoozing recuperatively from my all-nighter, it had become clear that this would take a couple hours more.  My overwhelming desire to be alone was in diametric opposition to my equally overwhelming desire to fully engage the fever of having this adonis within speaking distance.  Alone won. 

I was all but snarling audibly by early afternoon.  I think I even caught their attention briefly with a little petulant cabinet-slamming, or a loud expellatory sigh.  Or two.  I guess I blew my chances for a blow-job; there won’t be any illicit encounters with landlord-grandson, at least not in the apartment which I occupy.  Oh well.  Maybe I really do prefer the view of him through imperceptibly parted venetian blinds as he scurries about outside my windows.  Despite my pining for contact, maybe I do prefer to be alone.  Maybe. 

But maybe I just do not know how to do it; me and the cute boy, or me and you, or me and anyone at all.  The game is tedious for me for some reason, at least it is the way I play it.  Probably I am not ‘following through,’ as in a perfect golf swing.  Probably I am not surrendering to the flow, swimming with it, cooperating with life, and even redirecting it a little as the course of things might allow.  Probably somewhere long ago I chose to fight, and to make that my sole companion, to dig my toes, my whole legs even, deep into the muck and fight the flow while also trying to keep my head above it. 

Could it really be the complete opposite?  That this stream of experiences—this dream of existence—is really the bouyant of my life instead of its inundation?